It's a wild, wild world out there!

Even if the "out there" is no further away than our own backyard. I meant to write this post days ago, but I think delaying it has only allowed me to add more to it. Some of you may already know this, but for those of who don't, we live in a somewhat rural area. By "somewhat rural" I mean that we are in a nice populated neighborhood, but our property is set back a bit from the street. Basically we can't see our neighbors and they can't see us - which is nice! And the fact that we're surrounded by privately owned forest land (which hasn't been developed yet and we hope it never does!) is one of the main reasons why we bought this house 8 1/2 years ago. Hubby J actually grew up in this town and is very much used to all that the wildlife has to offer since his parent's house abutted a state forest. Me being a city girl on the other hand...well let's just say, I'm still adjusting to all the critters that live surprisingly close to our front door.

The best have been the family of deer that usually bed down in our backyard under the hemlocks in the winter time...awww...the family of raccoons that ravaged our recycle bin looking for bits of food left in the cat food cans...the possum that I found in the garage (after accidently locking him) who insisted on played dead under J's car until J got in the car and started the engine...the fox we saw running through the yard one day...the bat that accidently got into our house while we were pulling in a window unit air conditioner (that little bugger was tough to catch!)...the baby squirrel J found running in our bedroom one morning...the mice who always return when the weather gets colder...the black bear who came up to our front steps once...and the bobcat we saw high-tailing it down the driveway with what looked like a rabbit in its mouth. Yup - we've seen a lot here, but none of it prepared me for what I saw this past Sunday morning.

We were sitting down to a nice late breakfact when out the dining room window I saw a few deer galloping through the yard. Nothing unusual there, except for the fact that their white tails were completely upright. That's usually a sign to the others that danger is nearby. The next thing we saw was a very large buck being followed by what we first thought was a fox. How a fox could antagonize a buck as large as that one was beyond me. But after this fox came out from behind a bush we looked again and nope - it was not a fox...it was a coyote! A coyote was circling this buck about 30 feet away from our back deck...at 11 o'clock in the morning! We watched it for a few minutes but the deer headed off deeper into the woods (with the coyote nipping at its heels) so I didn't get a chance to take a picture of all this. Then I freaked out - one of our cats was outside! I grabbed our handy-dandy locator device (aka the homing device we have for the cats) and ran out the front door looking for him. Thankfully he was in the garage stalking something (another mouse I'm sure) so I grabbed him and ran inside. Now I'm trying to train our one outdoor-loving cat to be an indoor-loving cat, but it's not going as well as I had hoped. It's funny - after living here for 8 years, I never once heard (nevermind saw) coyotes up until this past summer. Since this summer, we've been hearing them at least once a week, so we knew they were nearby. And there is nothing more freaky than hearing a pack of them howling and yipping. It's the eeriest sound in the world! If you've never heard coyotes before, just listen to these recordings...

Coyote howling - this is a pretty cool sound actually. We hear this off in the woods quite frequently.

Hunting prey - this is the crazy hunting sounds they make to disorient their prey. Very freaky!

I just didn't think they were right near our backyard! And I knew they moved around a lot at night so that's why we always made sure the cats were in at night. But now it looks like the poor cats' daytime adventuring is going to get cut very short.

Since that Sunday, it's been wildlife central over here. We had a family of squirrels that ate up every stinkin' pumpkin that I still had out on our front porch. All 5 of them! At first I thought they were just going for the seeds, but no, they ate the WHOLE thing!! We caught one red (or should I say ORANGE!) handed.

You think the excitment ends there? Heck no!! I woke up this morning and staggered my bleary-eyed self into the bathroom only to find my girl cat Hailie stalking a mouse...in our bathtub...nice... I tried but failed miserably to catch it. The mouse...not Hailie...

So stay tuned cause I don't think the adventures are done here in Wilder Land!